Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

IS SOCIAL MEDIA ABOUT BRAND OR DIRECT RESPONSE?

Business activities that require expense and overhead need business justification. Social media, which is often tied to marketing or PR, must answer this question to qualify the type of analytics that is necessary to measure the social media campaign/product/experience and measure the business outcome. I had a chance to speak with Jascha Kayakas-Wolff, the chief marketing officer of MindJet, and he had this to say about social media analytics: “The promise of social data is to connect the anonymous with the known. As a marketer, there is very little that is more important to me and my organization’s success.”

Whether a business should be listening and engaging in social media is an “it depends” answer. While the author of this chapter strongly believes that all businesses should judiciously be using and measuring social media, it is obvious that every business has a level of social media listening and engagement that is right for it. Such decision making and the impetus behind it are beyond the scope of this book, but in order to frame social media analytics, a business must define which of the following (or some other reason) social media is to be used for:

• Brand. Social media channels (and their data) can be used to attract, message, encourage favorability, promote satisfaction, and act as variables for media mix and other marketing models that help identify brand equity, impact, and other higher-order consumer and shopping concepts. ...